Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

“I’ll be leaving soon,” he said.

“Are you sure about this?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head.

She continued to look at his profile, trying to memorize how he looked in the sunlight. “I’ll come with you.”

“No.”

“Well… take Gibs or Davidson with you at least—”

“No.”

“Jake…”

“I guess you’ll be starting up again on your cabin now.”

She drew in a sharp breath, taken off balance. His hand pulled out from under hers and then unwrapped it, warming the chilled knuckles.

“I… I need to have that space,” she said. “It’s too confusing in the cabin—walking into a room and finding you just standing there, wondering how I ought to feel about it.”

“The guilt…”

“No, not so much that anymore. I’m not convinced that what happened was wrong; I don’t think it was. We’d lost Billy, then found each other. If there was anything wrong, it’s just that we weren’t ready. Or I wasn’t.”

She looked down at his wide hand wrapped gently over hers and shrugged.

She said, “If anything comes of it, it’s got to be right. Does that make sense? I need to get into my own space, level off a bit. Kind of approach it at a speed that’s right. Do the whole thing right, really…”

“It’s alright; I understand. And I understand why you need that cabin. I said so, didn’t I?” His voice was kind. Patient.

She moved before she fully realized what she intended. Amanda reached up, took his face in her hand, and turned him to look at her. When they locked eyes, she kissed him. She kissed him for a good, long time, not giving one god damn about anything else that had come before or would come after in the diseased, fucked up world. She felt his arm wrap around her waist and pull her in, felt his hand cradle her behind the neck, fingers massaging gently at the nape where the hair stopped. She began to forget about everything else inside her or around her and briefly considered letting it all go, just letting everything go its own way, to spiral out of control into oblivion. Teetering on the edge, she pulled away from him. He looked at her in curiosity, eyes asking unvoiced questions.

“You make goddamned sure you find your way back. Understand?”

“Yes.”

He pulled on his heavier boots—the ones that had proven well against snow and water alike—laced and buckled them, and tugged his thick jeans down over the high ankles. He pulled on a knit cap, which snagged lightly over the stubble of his scalp, and a heavy, all-weather jacket. Exiting through the front door, he stood on the porch a while, looking out over the valley, attempting to guess the time from the sun’s position in the sky. A mild wind whispered through the Bowl, tugging gently at the tops of the pines in the distance; he thought he could just see their tops swaying. The trees reminded him of mothers looking down on sleeping babies.

He stepped off the porch and made for the valley exit a good kilometer away. He did this on foot for the second time in his life, all other excursions of such nature having been pursued along a different path. He thought about that as he walked. He thought such a thing might help to remind him who he was right now.

It did.

He passed the cleared out patch of ground, a rectangle measuring thirty feet wide by eighty feet long; his prototype. It was marked by dry-line tied off to batter boards, and he’d shoveled all the snow away with his own hands. What was left was a bit of a sodden mess; deep, dark earth pitted with small patches of standing water. He knew that muddy skin was a deception, knew that he only needed to cut through the top by a scant few inches before he found the still-hard under layer of chilled ground, shot through with rocks and other dangers.

He knew that somewhere under all that muck was the beginning of a grass field, at present invisible to the naked eye. He regarded that patch of ground as a process in motion; a never-ending continuation running from snow to water to earth to grass back to snow. There was energy stored up in that soil, though certainly not free.

The man smiled to himself and passed it all by, and planned. That patch of ground was where he would start, just as soon as he returned.

“He used to creep us the fuck out in those early days, eh? You get to know someone, or like, you try to, when you roll with ’em a while, right? You ask ’em shit. Where you from, who’s your family? What’d you do for work or whatever? You never—or I never—realize how much you rely on somebody’s past to define who they are, eh? Like, what they did, what they believed in? When all that shit gets cut off, it makes a dude jumpy. And then we got used to him, and all, and kind of figured out he probably wasn’t no psycho or nothing. But he sure didn’t fucking help us come to that conclusion if you know what I’m saying…”

Montez and Jeffries stood on the edge of two worlds and, regarding both, felt pitifully small. Behind them: their camp, looking so much more… compact. They’d gotten used to the vast, endless expanse of the Elysium Fields—its labyrinth of tents and temporary structures—that this new thing seemed a child’s approximation by comparison. The collection of vehicles off to the side was depressingly small, the number of tents was depressingly small, the collection of people now crammed closely together instead of being spread out comfortably… all of it was depressingly small. Small and shabby.

Looming up before them: the titanic wall of granite piled up high into a sky dark-pink like bloody water, as though they fell atop each other in a rush to come crashing down on the little encampment. The flat, chipped surface of the megalith was bathed in the red of the dying day; broken, bloody teeth gnashing at the hazy, overcast sky. Patches of snow still persisted in places, though the melt was now well and truly on, revitalizing rivers and streams throughout the range that had gone silent in the late summer.

Soldier and Marine stood at the base of the great mountain range, the unevenly paved road stretching out before the men and disappearing into their depths. Montez shifted uncomfortably in their presence while Jeffries did his best to look away from them entirely, failing by turns; his gaze was always drawn inexorably back to them.

“The hell is that, with you?” Montez grumbled.

“Huh?”

“Why the hell do you keep looking up there? You’re makin’ me all twitchy.”

Jeffries shrugged, looked back up at the ridgeline unconsciously, and said, “’Minds me uh home.”

“Home?”

“Yeah. Don’t look nuthin’ like where I growed up but… looks like home to me, all the same.”

A cold, biting wind kicked up, slithering down Montez’s neck before he could shrug his shoulders up against it. He shivered and said, “Hillbilly-ass pendejo …”

“If you like.”

The Marine scanned to the north and south, glanced back towards the tents, and sighed. “What’d you do up there, anyway? That was like, what, six months of liberty, right? Just cooled your heels or what?”

“Hunted some. ’Twas nice, that. ’Twas nice not havin’ to do all the damned paperwork. Just goin’ up into the ranges an’ backways an’ such… findin’ an animal out in God’s creation, an’ takin’ him. Then, I guess a-none uh these folks ever hunted a day in their life, so… Had to take ’em along, show ’em how. Had to show ’em most things, natur’ly. Slings an’ traps. Things you get from animals an’ which animals you get the best things from.”